How to Become a Successful Digital Marketing Consultant or Digital Marketing Freelancer

The most important question to ask yourself is whether you want to be a specialist or a generalist? Only then will you be able to establish what skills you can bring to the function.

In broad terms, you may decide to try and offer all of the following or specialise:

Search engine optimisation

Having a strong working knowledge of SEO is essential to carving out a successful career in digital marketing. Knowing how to get the most from SEO to improve the visibility of a website and generate an uplift in website traffic and conversion through the various search engines is a critical step in providing a digital marketing consulting offer.

Social media marketing

To be considered a valued digital marketing consultant or freelancer you’ll need to know how to design social media activities that drive engagement, send targeted traffic from social networks to websites and generally improve brand awareness. It’s a fast moving part of the marketing mix that requires constant “test and learn”.

Content marketing

Most digital marketing freelancers and consultants are involved in content creation of some form. This can be website content (such as blog posts, case studies, etc), ad copies, social media postings, or content to be published on other websites as guest posts or sponsored content.

To successfully handle all the content needs that may come your way, you should know how to create a well-planned content strategy. A content strategy is crucial to modern marketing.

Email marketing

Building a highly engaged email list is something that many marketers fail to do effectively. If you can help customers get better results from email marketing – building newsletters, nurture and nudge funnels and event triggered email communications – you’ll see a demand for your services. Working knowledge of software and automations is important here.

Pay per click advertising

As a digital marketing consultant, you are likely to be increasingly relied upon to design and manage pay per click campaigns for customers.

And as social media platforms begin to place more emphasis on paid content, it’s a great way to get more eyes on content and build trust through frequency and quality.

Conversion optimisation

Conversion optimisation on a website is the way to generate more revenue for a company without increasing traffic.

By becoming an expert in conversion optimisation, digital marketing consultants can bring immediate benefits to a business and consequently charge higher fees for the privilege.

Analytics

Being able to understand and interpret data and use it intelligently to improve performance is a key skill. This includes keeping on top of changes – like the pending closure of Universal Analytics and arrival of Google Analytics 4.

Being comfortable with data elevates your positioning and value and potentially who you are dealing with.

Building a digital marketing business is surprisingly simple. Start with defining your main area of expertise and position yourself using achievements from work with other customers to secure more of the same type of work.

To build an enhanced market positioning, also consider setting a specific type of customer.

If, for example, you can decide to provide SEO services (niche) to small manufacturing businesses (type), this is going to reduce the amount of competitors you’ll face. It will also help you tailor and target your content – offering relevant learnings, share the most relevant case studies and target the most appropriate prospects.

As a digital marketing consultant it is important to practice what you preach.

As an example of deploying a joined up personal brand strategy, a digital marketing consultant seeking to offer social media services for accountancy practices might want to start blogging on topics related to social media for accounting, then start to connect with local accountants and consider starting to attend local business meetings where accountants are likely to be.

A big part of building a joined up personal brand is becoming the “go-to” person for that customer segment on that issue

Building the content first and then networking means you have something to offer immediately.

Knowing what to charge and being able to justify it is one of the biggest challenges for aspiring and new digital marketing consultants and freelancers.

But to secure business, you need to be able to confidently deal with it.

Typically you can charge per hour, by month or by project.

Payment by hour or month are easy to establish as they are ultimately based on an hourly rate and number of hours. There is information online to help you establish a base price for your service in its niche, at the level of expertise you are offering.

To secure ongoing retained customers, best practice involves a specified package or regular scope of work to be agreed, together with any management and reporting time.

For a ‘per project’ rate, you’ll need to carefully consider what is required, your costs and decide on a price to get the job done.

Whichever route you choose, set your rate relevant to the perceived value of the work and the level of experience and expertise needed to do it.

There are various ways to build a network but the quickest and most sustainable are these.

Connect with other digital marketing consultants

Look for people a few steps ahead of you. This is great as you can learn and you will be seen as less of a threat. Social media platforms are a great way to find useful people to connect with and see how they are marketing themselves. Use the best bits to create your own bespoke approach which will be unique in your niche.

Connect with your customers and their connections

Word-of-mouth’ is a crucial way to get the word out. For most digital marketing professionals, LinkedIn is going to be the best tool for this. Connecting with customers and getting them engaging with your profile and content means people in their network will be exposed to it.

There may not be anyone with an immediate need but you are building a reputation and trust with every single post.

Regardless of whether you are an established digital marketing consultant or freelancer or a new entrant, the tools you will use will help define your service and its quality.

You might be a web designer and want to offer WordPress websites to dentists with a specific online appointment setting plug-in. Or you might be a Kajabi specialist seeking to help fitness professionals get out of 1-1 work and go global.

Whatever you do, evaluate the free and paid tools that will help you deliver the transformation you seek.

Becoming an expert in a small number of key tools is way more effective in time and cost terms than using different bits of lots of tools.

You may not want an employed team or an agency style business, but you’ll need support in the areas you are not proficient or simply want to do.

This is why the niche elements (1 and 2 above) are so important.

Conducting this exercise helps you focus on what you want to do, so you can resource the things you don’t want to do.

As a guide, in helping manufacturers win larger contracts with real world content marketing, I focus on content strategy and creation with 1-1 clients, choosing to outsource web design and development, video and design projects to partners.